Agent-based systems and models may be used to simulate human or other behavior in a wide variety of settings and fields, such as purchasing activity, social interaction, traffic flow, logistics, biomedical, portfolio management, population dynamics, combat behavior and others. Such agent-based systems typically must first create a set of agents and assign a set of characteristics and/or attributes to the agent.
In many purchase forecast agent-based systems, agents are assigned an awareness attribute. However, many existing purchase forecast agent-based systems treat awareness as a binary on/off characteristic which operates as a mere threshold to certain activity, and does not provide an accurate model of awareness in the real world.